Top Book Picks: Hospitality

Looking for a way to up your game in the world in the world of hospitality? Look no further! We’ve got our top five favorite books for you to check out and sink your teeth into! Check them out below with a brief description and choose your favorite to dive into!

Joy of Mixology
Gary Regan

You can’t be called Bardtenders without having a few books that are bar centric on your list of hospitality books. This is one of our favorites, especially for those who are just getting into bartending and looking for a way to develop their own individual style behind the bar. Gary, or Gaz, Regan was one of the many luminaries who carried the torch that brought us out of the dark ages of making drinks. Regan writes about how there’s more to bartending than just being a “Startender” where you get all of the glory and fame. There has to be passion for guests and the craft, the willingness to listen and learn every single day, and the desire to make an impact on others lives.

Be our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service
The Disney Institute

Disney is much more than singing cartoons and wearing mouse ears on your head. This company has it nailed down when it comes to delivering flawless hospitality day after day. This book focuses on a few key points, such as: Asking your guests what type of experience they would like to have, focusing on the quality of those experiences and products, having a delivery system for those experiences - both for guests and employees, and integrating all of those ideas into one cohesive vision. And of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This book is great dive into what it means to create an immersive experience and how to execute and grow those experiences over time.

Without Reservations: How a Family Root Beer Stand Grew into a Global Hotel Company
Bill Marriott

Personally, I’m always hesitant when I read a book about leadership that is written by someone about their own successes. Sometimes it can feel a little too self-congratulatory. While that does exist in this book to some extent, the rest of what the book has to offer is also extremely relevant to the field of hospitality. This book gives personal insight into navigating failures and success, creating your own decision making processes, and developing a healthy work culture for employees. Definitely a great read for those seeking to establish themselves with their own enterprise or seeking upward movement in the field of hospitality.

Setting The Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
Danny Meyer

There has actually been a lot of criticism about this book lately in regards to its main theme “Enlightened Hospitality” and how it has created hyper-entitled guests with too much leverage over employees and businesses (especially as we move towards a post-pandemic climate). However, this book is a seminal work in the field of hospitality - and an important read - because it was the first time that the general public got to see that jobs in restaurants, bars, and other aspects of the industry - were real and valuable. Other themes of the book include the “Yes Mentality” of always finding a way to make the guest happy, the hiring of the 51 percenter (the idea that a good employee has 51% emotional intelligence skills), and that it’s important to build a diverse team where everyone has a seat at the table. It’s important to remember that while a book may be a little dated in its approach - it wasn’t always the case. You have to understand where we’ve been in the past as an industry to see where we’re going in the future.

Barkeep

Danilo Bozovic & Andrija Ristic

A newer book in the world of hospitality when it comes to bartending and how we interact with guests from behind the bar. We all know that bartending is more than just making drinks and taking orders. Tending the bar is actually just as important, if not more so, than putting liquids in cups and creating those experiences for guests and communicating with guests is at the forefront. This book provides a fantastic overview into the history of bartenders who have paid the way, the importance of actually tending a bar, basic cocktailing information about spirits and making drinks, and of course, recipes for those who want to jump into the craft. An all around great approach to looking at the combination of bartending and hospitality.